Effective multiple location audio and visual collaboration has become an important and effective way of communication between individuals and groups over short and long distances. These could be belonging to one enterprise or multiple people from multiple enterprises. Till now for multipoint audio-video conferences, complete dependence has been on the multiparty bridge administrator. In order to set up a conference, a user must contact a bridge administrator of the multipoint control unit (MCU) and define the user's requirements, such as the address details of the participating users and the dial in numbers of users who will participate in the conference. The bridge administrator gives the users a list of telephone numbers of the MCU, one for each conference participant or location, and sets up the MCU for the conference. The user in turn share these dial in details with each of the conference participants. All the conference participants then call their respective dial in numbers to connect to the MCU. Conferencing via MCU is a pre planned and fairly complex procedure. The other option is to have virtual meeting rooms where every participant dials in with a password and joins the meeting.
Typically such multi-party call conferencing has a highly restricted and awkward user interface. For example, in a 3 party call, a user must first call a first party, wait until they have been connected, park that call, call a second party and then connect the calls together. For more than 3-party call, connecting all the parties to the call through a user interface operated by the participants themselves, is a laborious and time-consuming process. Furthermore, each supplier of handsets and/or PABXs provided with such user interface often have multiple, and non-standard complex function buttons or key strokes for joining additional parties to an ongoing call. Current video conferencing often involves complicated call set up and usually require someone from technical support to set up the equipments prior to the conference. With time, users are more educated and wish to have self operated systems, like the way they operate their cell phones. To avoid dependency on bridge operators, it has become necessary to have a system from where they can schedule or initiate multi party calls, choose between desired profiles of the meeting. Therefore, it is desired that the non technical users participating in the audio video conference calls should be able to initiate a conference call, join an ongoing call, selectively add or disconnect individual participants in a running call and opt for other call requirements through a single and a simpler user interface.
With the emerging market of touch panel displays in smart phones and tablets, it would be a tremendous advantage that all users using either their PC or smart phone or tablet can launch and control their own multiparty audio only, video only or audio and video mixed calls at the press of a button. Such calls should be able to connect multiple participants on different available networks.